2. There is peril in coming in. — It might seem to some that once a man was safely across the threshold of his home he might stand in less need of this promise of help. But experience says otherwise. Tlie world has little respect for any man's threshold. It is capable of many a bold and shameless intrusion. The things 1 H. C. G. Moule, Thy Keeper, 73.
PSALM cxxi. 8 55
that harass a man as he earns his bread sometimes haunt him as he eats it. No home is safe unless faith be the doorkeeper. " In peace will I both lay me down and sleep : for thou, Lord, alone makest me dwell in safety." The singer of that song knew that, as in the moil of the world, so also in the shelter of the place he named his dwelling-place, peace and safety were not of his making, but of God's giving.
The returns of life are hardly less adventurous and fraught with surprise than its outgoings. There are apprehensions that wake as we move into the areas of our familiar places again. What may have chanced in the hours of absence? What shock of joy or sorrow may have broken on the home ? To what revelation for which our hearts are unprepared are we drawing near ? There are moods in which the least sensitive of us has known these questionings. When sickness or anxiety is in the house, our feelings are intensified to a pitch at which we scarcely know whether to hasten or to linger. Or, when our nerves have been strained and jangled in the business hours, they may be quickened to an ominous foreboding.
And, indeed, it is always true that as changes have been worked for us who have been out in the busy world, so for those we left at home there have been also sequences of change. As we do not return the same men we went out in the morning, we do not find quite the same presences awaiting us. The home has had its own temptations and battle-grounds as well as the shop ; the wife and children have passed through their spiritual dis- ciplines as well as ourselves. For some hours we have been out of contact ; our developments may have been different. The ways along which we have journeyed may not have been the same, not even parallel, nor in the same direction. Our lessons may not have been similar, and our moods and thoughts may have moved on divergent planes.
We may be coming with buoyant steps from a day's work, where all has gone fairly and smoothly, to a house where number- less small irritations have ruffled the temper and played upon the heart. Or we may return weary and disheartened to a hearth where the day has passed in peaceful routine. We are in a sense strangers to one another. We have to adjust ourselves and to seek a new point of contact, and it may be very easily missed.
56 GUARDIANSHIP IN DAILY LIFE
We may strike in sudden discord upon one another, our unattuned moods may jar and clash. A husband's buoyancy may enter unsympathetically upon a mood of his wife who is worried and overstrained, or the man's ruffled temper may turn the placid welcome of the woman to bitterness, and so the peace that ought ever to be found on the threshold of home is not found there.
^ A Christian woman in a burst of querulous questioning said, "Ah, if these good men had like me the charge of six little children, and only a careless girl to help them, they would know better whether it is possible to be always at peace." Yes ! " The Lord shall keep thy coming in." Home — nursery — kitchen, are His as much as the closet. His keeping is needed in them all, and is equally possible there.^
III.
The Keeper of Our Way.
1. The recurring and characteristic word of the psalm is " keep " ; it is repeated no fewer than six times in the last six verses. The Creator of the universe is the Keeper of Israel. The Keeper of the whole nation is the Keeper of the individual man. The Keeper of the man and the nation does not fall into slumber from weariness; nor is his life, through mortal weakness, an alternate waking and sleeping ; He guards them from the perils of the night as well as from the perils of the day. He keeps those who trust in Him from evil of every form. He keeps their very soul, their most inward and secret life. He keeps them in all the changes and intercourses of their outward life, their goings out and their comings in. He keeps them through all lapse of time, now and for evermore.
We need more than ever to convince our own hearts and to lay emphasis upon the truth of the constant supervision of our Father in Heaven over the minutest details of our lives, for, as Carlyle put it, " The Almighty God is not like a clockmaker that once in old, immeasurable ages, having made his horologe of a universe, sits ever since and sees it go." Such a travesty of Providence leads to a gloomy fatalism, a fatalism that robs the heart of joy and of the safe-guarding realization of God's near and